Assassinating non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans. The leap here is not to victims of a different citizenship but to the legalization of murder.

By David Swanson

February 12, 2010 "Alternet" February 05, 2010 -- - -The
director of U.S. national intelligence told the House Intelligence
Committee the government has the right to kill Americans abroad.

Here are 10 problems with this:

1. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don't
cease to be crimes because you cross a border.

2. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don't
cease to be crimes because you engage in them frequently. Assassinating
non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans. The leap
here is not to victims of a different citizenship but to the
legalization of murder.

3. Killing people has nothing whatsoever to do with gathering so-called intelligence.

4. Even in this age in which senators and house members petition and
write public letters to the president imploring him to obey laws,
rather than introducing legislation, issuing subpoenas, holding
impeachment hearings, or defunding agencies, the fact remains that
Congress, above all, IS the government, and it is just not the place of
the director of national thuggery to come in and dictate what the law
will or will not be.

5. Having made the globe a battlefield and sanctioned crimes including
lawless imprisonment, torture, warrantless spying, indiscriminant
bombings, and the use of white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and other
sickening weapons, on the grounds that all is fair and legal in war,
preventing Americans from becoming the innocent victims of the war is
becoming harder and harder. If active military can be on duty here, if
we can be spied on, kidnapped, and imprisoned here. If our most
prominent foreign death camp can be relocated here, by what logic --
and for how long -- can government assassinations of Americans (without
trial) be confined to elsewhere?

6. Typically when we assassinate people abroad, a lot of other innocent
people are killed in the process. Those are all murders. That too will
come home if there is not resistance soon, major resistance to this
madness.

7. We are being asked to trust extrajudicial decisions on whether or
not to murder, not just to allegedly wise judges who are in too big a
hurry or find it logistically unfeasible to hold a trial, but to the
very people who lied us into the wars that are motivating most of the
international hostility toward our country and draining most of the
resources Americans need at home.

8. No republic has ever survived putting this kind of power in the
hands of a single ruler, with no independent legislature, no
independent press, and no independent popular resistance. And we're
almost there.

9. These people usually only admit to believing they have the barbaric
"right" to do things that they have already done.

10. What are the chances the Director of Intelligence will never
consider a president a threat to national security?

David Swanson is the author of "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial
Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press
(2009) and of the introduction to "The 35 Articles of Impeachment and
the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush," by Dennis Kucinich (2008).

Swanson holds a master's degree in philosophy from the University of
Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications
director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich's
2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International
Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications
coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for
Reform Now.

Swanson is Co-Founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, creator of
ProsecuteBushCheney.org and Washington Director of Democrats.com